After Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Quick Note on Why Not to Say That Israelis Are Nazis

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A moment of silence in Israel for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Photo: Twitter, The David Project.

One of the antisemitic tropes on display within the current Labour Party antisemitism row is some variation of the claim that Israeli policies are like those of Nazi Germany. This simply repellent charge — which has resulted in the suspension of several Labour Party members — suggests that, as former MP David Ward put it a couple of years ago, that Jews have not only failed to “learn the lessons” of the Holocaust, but actually exhibit Nazi-like behavior towards the Palestinians today.

Indeed, one of the few positive developments of the Labour scandal is that the British media — for the most part — has not even attempted to justify such views. Official editorials, op-eds and straight news stories that we’ve monitored have accepted the premise that such Nazi-Israel analogies — considered antisemitic per the EUMC Working Definition — are intellectually unserious and morally beyond the pale.

However, there have been grumblings on Twitter by some who seem to think it’s unfair that non-Jews “aren’t allowed” to use the Nazi analogy, while some Jews (even some Israeli Jews) do just that. Typically, of course, the Jews they’re referring to are usually either of the anti-Zionist variety with little, if any, real connection to the Jewish community, or — in the case of Israeli Jews — figures representing the extreme left of Israeli society.

In the case of comments made on Wednesday night by Major General Yair Golan, the IDF Deputy Chief of Staff, while speaking at a Holocaust memorial event in Jerusalem, former New Statesman editor Medhi Hasan was quick to seize the moment to implicitly question why such Nazi analogies are antisemitic, in the following Tweet.

Top Israeli general uses Holocaust remembrance speech to compare Israel to 1930s Germany. Is he an anti-Semite too? https://t.co/2eDBzXDQhh

Of course, Hasan’s characterization of Golan’s comments was extremely misleading, as Golan himself made clear later in the day when he said, “I had no intention of making that comparison.”

Golan added:

It is an absurd and baseless comparison and I had no intention whatsoever of drawing any sort of parallel or to criticize the national leadership…The IDF is a moral army that respects the rules of engagement and protects human dignity.

So, while Golan did not make the comparison, the larger point — as noted in a Tweet in response to Hasan by Guardian political columnist Rafael Behr — is that within minority communities there will always be some discourse that is acceptable within the group but not as an “accusation from without.”

So, leaving aside how completely ahistorical the comparison is, non-Jews calling a Jew a Nazi — or even hinting at some moral equivalence between Jewish Israelis today and the Nazis who murdered six million Jews during World War II — represents a Holocaust inversion and the ultimate insult, despite the fact that some Jews may implicitly (and quite irresponsibly) make such comparisons.

When coming from non-Jews, it strikes Jewish Israeli ears as simply a horrific term of abuse, designed to inflict maximum pain within the context of the shared collective memory of the Jewish people — a point that self-described anti-racists, of all peoples, should surely understand.

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It’s precxisely because jews and Israel “learned only too well the lesson” that they do not want to depend on other nations to protect jews that Israel must recover its land and be a strong nation able to defend itself and other jews. Thoise who do not want to learn the lesson are those who OPPOSE A STRONG ISRAEL so as to be able to start a new holocaust as soon as it suits them probably sooner than fake “liberals” think. As to claim the right for chirstians to kill jews again as soon as possible just because some stupid and cowardly jews do just that by turning kapos again,it’s a totally dumb claim.